Successful Marketing Requires Behavior Change

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Mondays are good days to think about change, establish new habits, and embrace chaos. And, all of those things come with successful marketing – it’s just part of the deal. You can’t not like marketing, not do marketing, or concede you’re no good at it – marketing must become a habit you come to love.

It’s tough to get around to marketing, I get it. You didn’t start your business because you were dieing to get your hands dirty with blogging, copywriting, and selling, but you soon found out that your business would die if you did not. So, what to do?

The secret to getting marketing done is to make it a habit. Or, if I may roughly paraphrase Aristotle - “We are what we repeatedly do. Marketing, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Most of us, I think, have more experience trying to break a bad habit than establish a good one, the secret is to create a system and process you can focus your attention on while establishing the behavior that eventually becomes second nature.

When it comes to marketing I’ve learned that small business owners can move towards making marketing a habit by doing these three things.

1) Monthly themes – choose one big marketing need – redo your website, write your marketing kit, create a new customer process – and make it the theme for that month – you can even plan out the next 6 months this way and you’ll stand a better chance of actually getting these done. This is a great idea when it comes to getting your entire staff focused on one thing. The problem is that when we try to do it all at once, we go into overwhelm and don’t get anything done. Make it simple, take the long view, and watch what happens.

2) Weekly reviews – When it comes right down to it, once you’re clear on your marketing strategy, marketing itself becomes a set of projects. When you start to look at marketing as the habit of focusing on a group of projects, you can begin to break those projects down into action steps or tasks. Your weekly marketing review should include everyone in your organization and pose the simple question – “what needs be done next” to each project on your plate.

3) Daily appointments – While you may have many things on your daily calendar, make it a habit to schedule one marketing time slot with yourself or someone working on marketing each day. This is the only way to keep the focus where it belongs – on constant advancement and improvement.

When it comes to establishing a system for getting marketing done, few compare, in my mind, to David Allen’s very simple, yet powerful, Getting Things Done. You should read this book and make it a gift to your entire staff. His latest book, Getting It All Done, is a great read as well.

You might also want to become of fan of Zen Habit’s Change Cheatsheet: 29 ways to ingrain a new behavior.

I happen to believe that owning a business is the true ticket to getting what you want out of life and that the successful marketing of said business is the only way to realize that possibility.

Image credit: David Reece

Here’s a quick review of a book that I’ve been reading – The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web – through over the past few weeks by Tamar Weinberg.

It’s a great read!

Apologies to Tamar for mispronouncing her name – should have been more like ‘Tuh-MAR’!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web [Video Review]

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The Easiest Way To Explain the Marketing Process

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Many marketers have been taught the concept of the marketing funnel. The idea being that you bring leads into the top of the large opening in a funnel and push the ones that become customers through the small end. The problem I’ve always had with that is all the focus is on the chase. I happen to think that real payoff in marketing comes from expanding and focusing your thinking on how to turn a lead into an advocate for your business.

Long ago I started using the concept of the marketing hourglass. The top half indeed resembles the funnel concept, but the expanding bottom half, to my way of thinking, adds the necessary focus on the total customer experience that ultimately leads to referrals and marketing momentum.

I use the diagram below in workshops to explain the logical path a lead should follow to participate in your fully developed marketing hourglass. This concept is one of the key elements of the overall Duct Tape Marketing system, but I could conduct entire workshops around this one slide as it seems to be the easiest way to explain the marketing process in simple and practical terms. At a recent workshop an attendee came up to me and said about this diagram, “I’m an engineer by trade and this marketing stuff never made sense to me, now it finally does.” – I guess that’s the ultimate test.

The Marketing Hourglass – (click to enlarge)

When you overlay my definition of marketing – “getting someone who has a need to know, like, and trust you” with the intentional act of turning know, like and trust into try, buy, repeat, and refer you get the entire logical path for moving someone from initial awareness to advocate.

The key is to systematically develop touchpoints, processes and product/service offerings for each of the 7 phases of the hourglass.

1. Know – Your ads, article, and referred leads
2. Like – Your web site, reception, and email newsletter
3. Trust – Your marketing kit, white papers, and sales presentations
4. Try – Webinars, evaluations, and nurturing activities
5. Buy – Fulfillment, new customer kit, delivery, and financial arrangements
6. Repeat – Post customer survey, cross sell presentations, and quarterly events
7. Refer – Results reviews, partner introductions, peer 2 peer webinars, and community building

Far too many businesses attempt to go from Know to Buy and wonder why it’s so hard. By creating ways to gently move someone to trust, and perhaps even creating low cost offerings as trials, the ultimate conversion to buy gets so much easier.

In order to start your thinking about the hourglass concept and gaps you may have ponder these questions:

• What is your free or trial offering?
• What is your starter offering?
• What is your “make it easy to switch” offering?
• What is your core offering?
• What are your add-ons to increase value?
• What is your “members only” offering?
• What are your strategic partner pairings?

Is Selling Becoming More Like Marketing?

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I have to admit that part of the motivation for the title of this post is to excite the sales oriented folks out there, but no question, the Internet has forever changed the practice of sales.

Today’s salesperson is often greeted by a sales lead that knows more about the technical or historical aspects of a product, service, or industry than they do. Selling evolved long ago from an act of presenting and closing to one of educating and consulting, but access to information via online sources, rating sites, filtering social media streams, and tools for competitive analysis have once again changed the game.

The game of selling in today’s digital information age has become one of helping a prospect aggregate and filter information and come to the shared conclusion of what value looks like. The salesperson that can best illustrate a valuable outcome wins. I don’t know about you, but from where I sit, that sounds a lot like what good marketing aims to do.

I love to use the medical profession to help make this point. (Doctors have long sold patients on what was best for them!) Years ago you went to a doctor, they diagnosed your problem, and offered a solution. If you were really sick you got a competitive prospective, but for the most part, you took the advice and moved forward. Today, patients have access to information about medical conditions, experimental drug trials, and therapies from alternative practices. Today’s medical buyer is often more informed on new medical directions than treating physicians. Few doctors can expect to see a patient and dictate a solution. The practice of medicine has evolved, in large part due to access to information, into one of helping patients filter information and come to a shared conclusion of the best path.

Today’s salesperson must employ the same online aggregating, filtering, and listening devices as their prospects or prepare to be dismissed as a hack.

Image credit: Lisa Brewster

Marketing Podcast with Chris “Trust Agent” Brogan

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Chris Brogan (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download) – subscribe now via iTunes

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast I had the pleasure of chatting with Chris Brogan. Chris is the President of New Marketing Labs and co-author of Trust Agents – Using the web to build, influence, improve reputation, and earn trust.

Chris really is one of the super stars of the online social media world and while he would never call himself one – he’s the ultimate trust agent.

It’s a tad ironic I think because the early days on the web were filled with untrust. Today, however, a new breed of open, authentic, and transparent communication has allowed relative unknown brands to build influence and trust and ultimately do more business than ever before imagined.

Chris Brogan is also one of the forces behind the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and somehow I made the agenda for the Oct 7-8 session in Boston, MA, so I hope you can come by and check out this great line-up and say hi. (I’ll even be a Red Sox fan that day if need be.)

Here’s what Chris and I covered in this podcast:

• Using the web to build trust
• About Trust Agents
• Translating “human business” to the web
• Building an online community
• Where people go wrong building an online community
• Paid Advertising – Is it dead?

You can connect with the Trust Agents Facebook community or be sure to check out Chris’ Trust Agents contribution on Fast Company

The goal of any start-up company is to get people to try their products. After all, no mater how many advertisements you run or how great of a viral marketing campaign you have planned, the basic problem that people haven’t tried your products and services still exists. You simply do not have an established brand name.

Hence, the most effective marketing technique for new start-ups needs to get the product in the hands of potential customers and the only way to do this is through providing free samples. Now this is easier in some industries than it is in others. For example, in every mall food court I have been to, there are dozens of restaurants offering free samples to anyone willing to take them. However, doing this is more difficult if you run say an online start-up or a company which sells high end electronics.

In these situations, you have to get more creative. If you sell a $1000 camera, you obviously can’t give one away to anyone who wants one. Instead, what you can do is hold a photography clinic and invite people to bring their own cameras and then test out your camera. If your camera provides better results, you are attracting people with a serious interest in photography who will be willing to pay for quality.

If you are running a web start-up the easiest way to do this (in my opinion) is through offering a free trial or showing a product demonstration video.

No matter what industry you are in there is a way to get your product in front of customers and allow them to sample it themselves. It may be easier in certain industries, but if you take some time to think outside the box, you will be able to find a way to do so for your own company. If you need help, share your product or business idea in the comments below.

The New Marketer’s Toolbox

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

More than once those that follow what I do have asked me how I seem to get so much done in a day. I have to admit that I get a lot of help from the man behind the curtain and from you my readers and subscribers. That’s the part that many don’t see, but the rich set of, often free, tools out there now make it much easier to run your business and increase your productivity.

I use a power set of tools throughout the day to write, collaborate, bookmark, filter, find and conduct commerce. Here is my current list of favorites, although like so much on the Internet, some of these could change in the blink of an eye.

Google Alerts – Free service from Google allows you to conduct customer searches for your brand, competitors, industry mentions, and journalists and have any mention of these terms online sent to your email inbox on a daily or as it happens basis. Key tool for monitoring your reputation in real time but it can also serve as a great client relationship building tool as well.

Central Desktop – I use this tool to collaborate with providers and clients alike. The set of features and flexibility from this tool is incredible. I was a hard core Basecamp fan, and still am, but Central Desktop just does so much more. You can manage projects, teams and schedules, but my favorite use is the built in WYSIWYG wiki editor. I use this to build web based operations manuals and document processes for my team.

Google Reader – I subscribe to and scan and read about 100 blogs and think you should too. I get some great ideas, hear about the next new thing, and find tools like I ‘ve listed here by adhering to this practice. Google Reader puts them all in one place and is very mobile browser friendly so I can jump on the site and read a few blogs any time I’m standing in line.

TweetDeck - This desktop application makes it very easy to keep up with what I want to follow on twitter. I create searches for key terms and form groups of people I want to follow closely. The tool also allows you to RT, tweet, DM, follow and unfollow directly from the interface. A mobile app is available as well.

Firefox – Firefox is, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, simply a browser, but it’s so much more due to the fact that you can extend its functionality through plug-ins and add-ons. I use it subscribe, blog, bookmark, filter and aggregate much of what I find online all day. I use it to help with web design, SEO and competitive analysis.

Flickr -In addition to optimizing and sharing images online I use the Creative Commons Licensing of images on Flickr to grab great photos for my daily blog posts. (I wrote about how to use Flickr for blog images here)

Snapz Pro X – This $29 software sits in the background and allows me to do screen grabs and video screencasts with the push of a few keys. There are free programs that can do some of this but the added editing and file format options of this program make it worth the money. I’m always adding screenshots in my blog posts and PowerPoint presentations.

Adium – I’m a pretty big fan of IM for internal office use as well as to use with my key collaborators. Adium is nice as it allows me to communicate with people using IM no matter if they are on Yahoo, AOL, Skype, or GTalk.

ScreenFlow Pro – Another paid program but this is simply the easiest, yet feature rich, video screen capture program I have ever used. I use it to turn many of my web and offline presentations into short movies to share on YouTube.

su.pr - This is a my tool of choice for much of my tweeting. When I use su.pr to post a tweet with a link it shortens the link bu also sets up a rich set of tracking so that I can view how many view, retweets and mentions the tweet received. In addition, because the tool is part of the StumbleUpon network it gives me the opportunity to receive or send traffic from this network to the pages I link to.

Email Center Pro – This tool allows me to create mailboxes for departments of information, such as sales, service, media requests, etc. and then, if I choose, assign emails to those addresses to various internal and external resources to address. I can create responses to many common questions and allow anyone to interact from that department. In addition, I can see the entire archive of any of the discussion threads that might occur in any conversation from a dashboard. Great customer service tool.

Jott – This tool allows me to use my phone to “jott” a message that is transcribed and sent to my email. I use this all of the time when I am driving along and am hit with a thought for a blog post. Additionally, you can set-up groups and contacts on Jott so you can send anyone you set-up emails via your voice messages. You can post appointments to Google Calendar and, if you speak very slowly and use simple words, post tweets.

SimpleNote – Every morning I make a to-do list based on what I want to get done that day. I’ve been doing this for years and it keeps me productive. I started using note pads but now I use SimpleNote on my laptop because it is simple (duh) and it syncs to an online page and my phone so I can have access to my daily list no matter where and how I choose to access it.

WordPress – There are many ways to create web sites and blogs but I just love WordPress. In addition to being one of the simplest ways to create and manage all your web pages and content, the developer community that creates add-ons, themes and tutorials is hard to beat. I encourage most businesses to use it for their entire site, it’s that good.

Google Analytics – Tracking traffic, trends, searches and conversions is a necessary and basic marketing tactic if you want to grow your business. Google’s free analytics package is a no brainer and can give you so much feedback you’ll wonder how you lived without it. Take the time to read and understand everything it can do and you will get even more. Combine it with Site Optimizer and you can begin to do the slightly more sophisticated A/B split testing and find out how to really fine tune your web site.

InfusionSoft – I use Infusionsoft to run the CRM, ecommerce, email marketing and affiliate tracking aspects of my business. There are individual tools that do each of these functions quite well (In fact I also use ACT!, SwiftPage and Vertical Response), but Infusionsoft is the one tool that brings all of the functions under one roof. It’s not for everyone, but it is a nice tool that keeps getting better.

The following is a guest post by Bryn Youngblut. Bryn has being creating websites and doing various affiliate marketing for over 7 years. You can subscribe to his blog by clicking here.

Note: This is part 3 of a 3 part series.

This is the post you’ve all been waiting for, the meat and potatoes.

I assume by now you’ve had your first campaign up and running for a couple days and hopefully you are seeing some positive results, if not don’t fret!

It’s time to analyze your data and optimize your campaign. There is many ways to optimize your campaign, the most common being split testing various things, whether it be your header font color, text/image placement, anything really. If you’re unsure of how to do this properly you simply need to setup a rotating script that will evenly show multiple versions of your landing page which you then track individually using tracking202’s advanced landing page code to distinguish which page is performing the best. You can of course also use other tools such as heat maps to see how your customers are interacting with your landing page.

The next best way to optimize is of course to eliminate keywords/urls that are simply not converting or losing you money. This is where your tracking comes in handy, by looking over what you’ve spent on each keyword and how much revenue it has brought in, you can simply pause what is not profitable.

Here are some tips that I am going to recommend trying, and these are based on you using your own landing page:

• Have a custom audio recording start playing as soon as your page loads to grab the users attention right away, this works great for pop unders especially. (unfortunately MediaTraffic doesn’t allow this but some other PPV networks like TrafficVance do)
• Remember how the pop up windows are 750×550 pixels in size? Make sure your landing page fits in that area and isn’t too big so it requires the user to scroll over.
• You are interrupting these people with your website, you need to KEEP IT SIMPLE. Get to the point quickly or they will close the window in seconds.
• Try thinking more long term instead of just getting a simple email opt in or sale, set up your own email list and market to the customers yourself, with more than one product over a longer period of time. (this is not simple to do but has amazing potential)

I have pretty much covered everything you need to know when getting started with Pay Per View Advertising, as broad as I can without writing up 50 pages of detailed information.

From here on out if you take PPV serious enough you will see the amazing potential it has. You WILL lose money testing things. You WILL have unsuccessful campaigns. You WILL fail, and that’s life. But if you make it past all the failures and don’t give up I can almost guarantee you will be successful.

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

PPV Advertising 101 – Untap the Potential (Part 3 of 3)

The following is a guest post by Bryn Youngblut. Bryn has being creating websites and doing various affiliate marketing for over 7 years. You can subscribe to his blog by clicking here.

Note: This is part 2 of a 3 part series, stay tuned for more!

So you’re all signed up to Mediatraffic and Trafficvance, right? Well even if you’re only with Mediatraffic for now that will be good enough to get you started.

You should know by now what the basics of PPV are, but you may not know exactly what the user sees.

The most common form of PPV is a 750×550 pop up window. You can also choose to do a pop under, it really depends on the offer, your landing page, and testing to see what works best.

The first step is to choose what product or service you want to promote, the most recommended are simple and short form submits, but I wouldn’t limit yourself to trying anything.

Now that you have chosen an offer it’s time to start researching keywords and most importantly urls.

There are a number of ways to do this, I’m not going to go into details about researching keywords but a great tool is of course the ShoeMoney Tools.

As far as finding urls goes, it’s pretty simple but does require some creativity. What I typically do is a simple search for my offer or things related and copy down the urls that come up, then I take those urls over to Quantcast.com and get a ton more related websites using the “Audience Also Likes/Visits” feature on the right hand side.

Once you have your list of keywords/urls it’s time to setup your campaign. It is VERY important that you track everything so you can eliminate what keywords/urls are not working.

For the best tracking platform I recommend using Tracking202 Pro (that link is a 10% discount if you want to sign up) or if you prefer to host your own Prosper202.

In Mediatraffic to track your keywords/urls it is very simple, when your campaign is created simply go into the “Modify” section under Targets and select the “Target Pass-through” option.

For Trafficvance it is slightly different but very easy, simply ad to the end of your tracking link like you would if you were using Google Adwords, except put “%%$KEYWORD%%”, so it would look something like this http://yourdomain.com/?keyword=%%$KEYWORD%%

The most common question I get is “Should I direct link the offer or use a landing page?” and I always reply with, if you’re not sure why don’t you split test it and find out? Some offers work well direct linking to them, and some do much better with a jump page.

So now that you have your first campaign setup it’s time to get it running. You will notice there are bids for positions, the cool part is the system will show you where you are as you update your bids.

The way the bid positions works is typically 70% of the traffic goes to the person in 1st position, 20% to the 2nd and around 10% to the 3rd and lower positions.

Now that your campaign is live and running it’s time to let the traffic flow and collect data.

In the last part of this series I will talk about split testing your campaign, optimizing it and some great tips you may not have thought about.

Stay tuned!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

PPV Advertising 101 – Untap the Potential (Part 2 of 3)

The following is a guest post by Bryn Youngblut. Bryn has being creating websites and doing various affiliate marketing for over 7 years. You can subscribe to his blog by clicking here.

Note: This is part 1 of a 3 part series, stay tuned for more!

So what exactly is Pay Per View Advertising?

PPV (Pay Per View) is also known as contextual advertising. PPV (also called CPV) is technically Adware, not to get confused with spyware. Adware comes from an ad supported program that a user installed onto their PC, which they agreed to when installing it. PPV allows you to not only bid on keywords but also domains (urls).

So whats so good about PPV? From my experience it is incredible if done right. I have some campaigns for instance that I spend maybe $20-$30 on a day and they each do thousands in revenue. Not bad eh?

Why am I sharing this information? Probably because I am a mad man, or maybe because I do well enough that I feel like giving people some inspiration, it has always helped me in the past.

Now that you know the basics lets get into it a bit more.

You’re going to need to be signed up for some networks to get started.

The ones I recommend personally are:

Mediatraffic and Trafficvance

Zango is a good ppv network, but they have a bad history of stealing peoples campaigns, so use them at your own discretion.

As for the two I recommend, your best bet is to apply at Mediatraffic first since they are relatively easy to get started with. Trafficvance on the other hand is not so easy to get into, you need to convince them you are serious because they don’t want a ton of junk advertisers that will just waste their time. Think of it like if you were applying for an affiliate network, take some time and actually explain your skills and convince them why you are good enough to be an advertiser with them, trust me they have VERY high quality traffic.

Now that you have signed up for some networks it’s time to think about what you want to promote.

I will continue this in the next post, your task right now is to get signed up for the networks! Without being able to use them, the next couple posts will be useless to you.

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

PPV Advertising 101 – Untap the Potential (Part 1 of 3)